Filtering by Category: Technology

Yesterday I cycled up to Coed Llandegla, a mountain bike trail centre and café in North Wales. It's a round trip of about 60 miles (96km) from home; mostly climbing on the way out, leaving a relatively fast return. It's not too challenging a ride, though there was a very strong headwind all the way there yesterday, followed by a snowstorm as I reached the Llandegla moors and then heavy rain and wind for the remainder of the ride.

I always log my rides on a Garmin cycle GPS/computer, and I'm currently using the Edge 1000. I've kept records of my rides since the early 1980s. In those days there wasn't much data to record. I kept diaries with distance, average speed, time, weather conditions and a brief description of the route.

Nowadays most of that data is gathered automatically and then uploaded to (in my case) Garmin Connect and Strava. It's worked pretty flawlessly with the Edge 1000 and with the Edge 800 I had for a couple of years before.

Yesterday, it let me down...

On entering the café at Llandegla, the device lost contact with the satellites it uses for triangulating location. That's quite normal when entering a building. What it didn't do was reconnect with the satellites as I left for my journey home. This could possibly have been due to the heavy snow falling at the time, anyway, I didn't notice anything unusual, as the primary screen on it is set to display basic data, all of which was working as normal.

I first noticed something wasn't quite right about 15 miles later, when I reached the path alongside the River Dee, which is almost flat and not far from sea level. The Garmin display indicated that I was descending at a steady 3% and that I was already over 150 metres below sea level. It was still pouring with rain and I couldn't be bothered to find out what was wrong. About 20 minutes later, I stopped at The Eureka Café on Wirral for a short break, and when I left there, all appeared to be normal again with the Garmin.

When I uploaded my ride to Connect and Strava there was a straight line on the map between the two cafés indicating that no mapping data had been recorded, even though my speed and average speed had been logged correctly.

I hate when things don't work as expected and I'm probably over reacting to this, but it really annoys me to see that straight red line on the map. I've made a note about what happened on both services, but I really do wish that I could get in to the .fit file generated by the Garmin and correct the data.